It Is Not Baggle

A Way With Words is an NPR podcast that I listen to from time to time. Recently, I caught an episode entitled Brollies and Bumbershoots, which as you might well imagine examined words of British vs. America origin.

As interesting as the introductory topic was, once they got into listener calls, any topic became fair game. What I was taken with was the caller who wanted some help with the pronunciation of bagel. She was a teacher from Michigan who called in with her whole class listening in on the conversation. She was at her wits end trying to convince the students to say it with a long ā (BAYGUHL) and not with a short ă sound which we would use with words such as BAGGLE (if it were a word) or WAGGLE which is a word.

The hosts put it down, at least partly to the Northern Cities Vowel Shift, but I don't believe that is the real cause. You see, it is also a Canadian thing, and Canada is not undergoing this vowel shift, or at least not nearly to the same degree.

It is the kids who are determined to pronounce bagel as baggle, kids like Danica. It is not a new thing; her mother used to do it. She eventually shifted to the standard pronunciation.

Why do kids want to do this?

Well, it does make a kind of sense. They hear how bag is pronounced, and bag is the first syllable of bagel. Also, if you think of it, we learn most words from hearing how others pronounce them. Maybe kids don't really hear the word, bagel, very much, or maybe (Gasp!) they even hear certain adults making the same mistake.

The general rule is that a vowel takes the long ā when it is followed by just a consonant which is in turn  followed by a vowel. Thus, we know to say label as laybuhl and Mabel as maybuhl. This rule also applies when two vowels come together as in the word mail, which also brings to mind that we rhyme mail and male.

Similarly, we know to pronounce the a as short (ă) in words like cabbie, rabbit, waggle, manner and dagger because that's the rule when consonants double after a vowel.

If that is not enough to convince anyone, consider that bagel is a Jewish word, and I have a Jewish daughter-in-law who says bayguhl. That should settle it once and for all, I would think.

Should.

However, Danica and her friends will likely persist in pronouncing it as baggle. At this point, after fruitless discussions, I figure that she probably does it just to tease me.

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While I am on the topic of language and pronunciation, I came across a short post about the Northern Cities Vowel Shift and how it compares to Canada. Interestingly, it points out that a person from Toronto sounds much more like a person from distant California than a person from nearby Buffalo. I have also noticed this. For example, American newscasters tend to sound very much like Canadians.

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This is a link to a short YT video about the Northern Cities Shift with maps and so on. especially interesting to me is that it mentions that in the past NBC used this region's dialect as their standard and that is closer to how Canadians still speak. Much has changed and fairly rapidly, it seems.

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Speaking of vowel shifts, English had a very big shift in the past. Old English sounds like a foreign language, and we find it difficult to understand. Listen to just a minute of this video if you don't believe me. https://youtu.be/tCckcTHWqKw

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Finally (I swear it really is finally) I will have you know that Canadians do not say aboot and hoose. Trust me on this. But even British people can't seem to say it the way that we do. Which, of course, the right right way to say, just as the gods intended.